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There are very few games that all of us at RPS find ourselves all anticipating so hotly, and this week Deus Ex: Human Revolution is finally with us. Copies should unlock in the US at midnight tonight, while other parts of the world (needlessly) have to wait another four days. Are our anticipations met? I’ve finished the game and will do my best to tell you Wot I Think.

It’s an extraordinary relief. Like that moment when your shoulders finally slide down into the hot bathwater, you physically and mentally relax in the knowledge that you’re back to that place. Remember when first-person games were complex, multifarious, and had a quicksave? Remember Thief, Deus Ex, Bloodlines? It’s that place, that brain-massaging, hair-stroking safe place of excellence that it was getting hard to remember ever really happened.

It’s worth noting at this point that I have no intentions of going into the intricacies of the game’s plot, any of the surprises in place, and I’m even going to avoid getting into too many of the mechanics of how it works. Much is about free exploration of ideas, and making decisions based on the limited information available and your own personal agendas. Saying, “It’s so great that feature X eventually lets you…” or “It’s crap that X never really gets powerful enough” could define how you’ll play, which would be robbing you of what I had when I started. At the same time, it is necessary to critique some aspects of the game that will by necessity count as such mechanical spoilers. I’m aiming to be extremely careful.

A gentle opening sets some agendas. Following your scientist companion through the laboratories of Sarif Industries, you as Adam Jensen (with the face you’re given) begin on rails. You meet people, watch conversations, and get a feel for the place you work in. Before everything around you goes to shit. It’s going to be a game about people, about places, and about conflict.

The central conflict in the second half of the next decade lies between the growing popularity of artificial augmentations for humans, and those who believe in the purity of the human form. A subject that is increasingly becoming relevant to us now, and I think that’s the motivation to have things set so near. Augmentation is already a norm in the game’s setting, years before the events of the original, with rival firms around the world competing for dominance in the field, while those left unaugmented fear for their futures. Why would you hire someone who doesn’t have a bionic arm over someone who does? What good is a photographer that requires cameras and equipment when another person can take the shots simply by blinking? And that fear, the sense of a divide and global societal pressure to artificially improve yourself to maintain advantage, is what DXHR aims to explore.

In effect, what this means is going to various parts of the world and sneaking past/stunning/killing lots of people in large buildings, between chatting with locals in the streets. The towns are amazing. Huge locations, without feeling like unwieldy “open city” zombie towns, packed with shops, alleys, sewers and clubs, peopled by individuals with unique attitudes and voices. Although it can sometimes feel like there’s not much to do, there’s always plenty of places to go, and various routes to take. You’re generally looking for someone who’s mentioned in a current quest, whether the main, or something on the side. However, talk elsewhere and you can hit glass walls. Once off the street, the chances are you’re going to be in an elaborate office complex with an atrium centre, huge laboratories, and private offices upstairs. Which is a great place to be the first… three times? It’s certainly a fair argument that some locations get repetitive.

Let’s stress the ‘great places to be’ part. They really are. This is a game that gets stealth so very, very right that you start to get angry about games you previously thought were fine. Cover drops you seamlessly into third-person, somehow without this ever feeling weird, and neatly hugs the world’s features. Features that don’t, by nature of the environments, feel like they were put there purely in case some invading combatants were in need of cover. Office equipment, doorways, street furniture and supply deliveries all feel like they should be there, which in turn means you get to feel like you’re manipulating the world to your advantage, rather than the other way around.

And locations genuinely do have multiple routes through them. It’s often hard to appreciate quite how much choice you had until you accidentally stumble on something later. For instance, if you find your way into a building by avoiding bribing the person at the entrance, and instead climbing carefully stacked crates and bins to reach an open duct, then crawl your way in through the tunnels to a cleaning supplies closet, you might later on take a wrong turning and find yourself on the roof. A roof you’ll realise has a ladder leading to a gap where you could jump to a nearby residential building, which you could have hacked your way into and climbed within.

In the end your style of play is met not by the world changing to suit you, but by your simply never encountering the options others might have gravitated toward. And the same very much counts for how you go about dealing with enemies.

I completed the game without firing a bullet. Let alone killing anyone. (With a massively exceptional caveat we’ll be coming to very soon.) Using a combination of tranq guns, the tasering stun gun, and most of all, hands-on non-lethal take-downs, I made sure that the available enemies were out of commission, but without any loss of life.

There was a motivation to play this way, although it came from me, rather than the game – the opportunity to play any game without the thoughtless murder of strangers is enormously appealing. But there was also the option, should I have taken it, of just sneaking my way past most of them without conflict at all. However, that’s less fun! (Let alone that if you knock a guard out rather than kill him, and his body is found by another, he can be revived. If they’re all sleeping, no one’s going to be reviving them.) So my particular tastes were carefully met by the game.

Then again, if they’re dead they’re equally not getting back up. And so while an encountered body will raise alarms (which is why it’s best to hide them well), if you’re killing people they’re going to be under-staffed when they all come after you.

Those are the choices you make on your own. But of course there are others that involve other people. Let’s take the first mission as an example, because it suits and doesn’t give away anything once the story has gotten going.

Terrorists have entered a Sarif factory, and workers are being held hostage. However, your main goal is to recover some technology that you don’t want to fall into enemy hands. You can deal with this in a great number of ways.

My first time, I knocked out enemies I encountered until I found those hostages, and I saved the life out of them. Then at the end, when encountering the terrorist leader holding a gun to the head of one of the hostages’ wives, I used my judgement (genuinely my judgment rather than Jenson’s) to talk him into letting her go, but also let him go free. For my own reasons I won’t share.

I could have, however (as I did in a second play), kill every terrorist, then find the hostages and brutally murder each of them, one begging for forgiveness for whatever it was he’d done wrong. Reaching the end I shot the terrorist in the head fast enough that he couldn’t get a shot off to kill the captured lady, then killed both the police officers who showed up, and stabbed the hostage lady to death.

It’s fair to say this rather extreme approach wasn’t quite recognised by the game. The reaction of colleagues after was not to my sociopathy, but rather to my having killed the terrorist so he couldn’t be asked questions. It’s reasonable to expect people not to play this stupidly, but it is a bit of a shame that it’s possible to do, if the game isn’t going to react to it. But the key point here is: it’s possible to do. As would have been never finding the hostages and their getting blown up purely through negligence, getting into a firefight that saw the hostage wife killed, capturing the lead terrorist to be questioned (I’m fascinated to know what is learned by this route), and all sorts of other permutations. And that’s the first mission. Which hopefully goes some way to getting across the point that this game is so much more than most.

Which makes stupid mistakes stand out like throbbing pimples on a beautiful pristine face. And the pimpliest of them all are the boss fights.

Yes, indeed. This most inappropriate of places has boss fights. Which would be ignominious enough if they weren’t incredibly lousy boss fights. Feeling as though they were programmed by another team, from another planet, they absolutely, unequivocally do not fit in this game. They’re the sort of inclusion that you can only think, “I can’t wait until enough time has passed that the developers will feel able to tell the miserable story of why this happened.”

It sucks that they’re there at all, and it sucks more that they’re all so boring and tedious, lacking even the grace of a classic Nintendo boss fight that at least contains a logical path. But what goes so far beyond just sucking is the betrayal they represent. Here all illusion of choice is gone. All playing styles are abandoned. Playing as someone killing no one, learning that the first fight at least, early on in the game, forces me to kill a man almost put me off the game entirely. Despite only using stuns, EMPs and tranqs on him, I was still treated to a cutscene of a man covered in bullet wounds and blood, gasping his last words as he died. And my clear response was: Fuck you.

I didn’t play for two days.

In the end, the only sensible response is to pretend they’re not there. They have so little to do with the game, and their inclusion makes so little sense, that it’s oddly easy to pretend they didn’t happen. Bizarrely their impact on the plot is minimal, and in they end they’re not actually that hard, so really you can switch off, angrily get past, and then carry on playing the splendid Deus Ex game you were enjoying.

Much more interesting is the augmentation system. As I mentioned, I’m not going to go far into this here. But with hard-earned Praxis Points you can unlock new abilities that define how you’ll approach situations depending upon the order in which you unlock them. Focus on hacking skills and you’re obviously going to do better by breaking into terminals and cracking your way past electronic door locks. But if you’ve been beefing up your arms, such that you can punch through fractured walls, you’ll be more likely to create your own pathway. Again, it’s more choice.

And there was mentioned hacking. Oh, poor hacking. Every game that does it thinks the only method is a puzzle minigame, and DXHR is no exception. Although I’d say it’s the best one so far. It’s not interesting enough to explain in words, but it serves its purpose of forcing you to be in a panic to get into a computer before alarms are set off or patrols wander by. It certainly could have been more interesting, but it never offends.

There’s an accusation that can be thrown at some projects that they’re not nearly as clever as they think they are. But DXHR feels like a game that’s not nearly as clever as the people making it obviously are. And again, it’s not a case of unrealised ambition, or reaching too far. It’s a genuine shame that your companions’ feedback based on your playing style all but dries up after the very first mission, and I think that certainly was a needlessly missed opportunity to capture something that made the original DX special. Perhaps there they simply bit off too much. But beyond that, I felt like it was holding back.

I’ve not mentioned the original DX until this point because I find comparisons pretty unhelpful. But it’s hard not to recall a few of the game’s more esoteric highlights. The books in the game, a combination of technical and fiction literature, were compelling and mostly went over my head as I reached to understand. In DXHR they’re almost entirely technical documents on various aspects of augmentations, whether how they actually work, or discussion over the debates related to them. None made me think.

The conversations in DXHR are wonderfully voiced and impressively acted, and generally very well written. But none made me realise how little I knew about a subject, nor challenged my philosophy on a matter. And yet it felt like, from the atmosphere and attitude of so much of the game, that those creating it certainly could have achieved this. Wonderful stories are told just by hacking into people’s emails and following the threads of conversations from multiple angles. This is a smartly made game. But I fear it’s not actually a smart game. And as much as I may be otherwise determined to not let my memories of an eleven year old game determine my experience and opinion of this one, I wasn’t able to shake that desire to be playing a game that was demonstrably far brainier than me.

It looks good enough, but it’s hard not to constantly feel the struggle for polygons as they fought against the archaic tech of the Xbox 360. The PC version is certainly prettier, and the port is sublime – everything is optimised and works exquisitely with mouse and keyboard. But it’s undeniable that the engine looks dated. (Which is perhaps only appropriately in keeping with the series.) While Jenson’s face looks decent, many NPCs look almost unfinished in the fight to save polys. The cities are big and dirty and interesting, but don’t look too closely or you’ll see the 2D cheats, missing textures, and weirdly blocky backgrounds. This is definitely not a case of crying “consolitus!”, because this is one of the most PC games in years. But at the same time it’s a shame that it has been so obviously visually restricted.

Come close to real greatness and your defects are illuminated by the heavenly glow.

What you have here is a compellingly entertaining game, with some of the most rewarding stealth I’ve encountered. And most of all, you have choice. Choice about whether you mow down enemies with a machine gun, or tap them on the shoulders and punch them in the face. Choice about whether you sneak in via the roof, through the sewers, or march boldly in through the front door. Choice about whether you hack, smash or learn passwords through information retrieval. Choice about whether people live or die. So in those tiny moments when the game robs you of choice, it rather offends. But mostly it does not, and it’s a fantastic, elaborate, and so rarely today, long game.

The most interesting parts can’t be discussed here, because they’re yours to discover. And really, discover them you should. Despite its obvious visual console shackles, this is a game that remembers what PC games were once all about, and honours them. It’s a refreshing reminder of what games can be in the current swamp of six-hour follow-em-up shooters, and stands shoulders, chest and waist above. When games get close to the glory of Looking Glass, our expectations can rise extremely high. That Deus Ex: Human Revolution meets so many of them is a remarkable feat.

Deus Ex is released at midnight tonight in the US, and then for reasons beyond explanation, midnight first thing Friday in the UK.

Why does it take Steam four days to get the game from the USA to Europe, when Bittorrent does it in an hour? [tl;dr: delayed launches will cost publishers sales].

On topic: I played through the first mission at Gamescom. The XBOX version definitely doesn’t have quicksave, at leas the demo version I played didn’t, On your way to the mission you get to choose if you want an assault rifle or a revolver and after that if you want to play lethal or nonlethal. So you’re dropped off by a helicopter. I proceeded to shoot everyone in sight. Enemies, friendly SWAT team members. But the game didn’t react. It just ignores your actions. No Lambert to Sam Fisher style “man in ear” disproving of your actions and acting as your conscience.

Different kinds of freedom though. FO’s give you an open world, at least. AP is a really bad example freedom wise though, as there is almost none. In the Fallout series, you can make some impactful decisions long term. However, every single task you take on, every problem you solve or create, you do so in one of a maximum of about three ways that the developers have predetermined. In an immersive sim, the developers ideally build up a semi-real situation (with an eye on how it might be resolved) and let you at it however you want.

I work for a big software company and we recently released an updated version of one of our email security products. The release in Europe, Asia, and….Canada? was delayed by two weeks. Normally this isn’t a big issue for us but allot of our customers are international and this caused allot of issues for the early adopters that wanted to deploy it to all there centers internationally at once.
Since I was so blown away by the delay to Canada (were in the states) I asked my boss. The response I was given was that it was to “Pressure test” our software before it is released into other “less forgiving” markets. Apparently Americans are commonly used at “Post Release beta testers” because we are far more accepting of crap products.
So if you feel bad about getting to play games later it is just because no one wants to send you partially tested crap…cause you like…dont like that. hehe

What made me order is that through the tutorial (hurray for “demo”) i just felt the urge to shoot the kind officer that was briefing me in the face, i then proceeded to take out his squad and every NPC/mob in the level. Dunno why but i felt so… free.

I get enough ‘impactful’ at work. Don’t start splashing it all over RPS too otherwise the madness will never end and we’ll all be using ‘blue sky thinking’ and taking the ‘helicopter view’! Effective is the word you want.

Well I’m pretty sure the reason why EU (or the UK, at least) gets it 4 days later is simply because games are always released on fridays here. I’m guessing in the US it’s on mondays?
I guess it kind of makes sense, gives you something to look forward to for the weekend, but also if there’s a huge release people are less likely to miss work the next day due to “sickness”…

“It’s an extraordinary relief. Like that moment when your shoulders finally slide down into the hot bathwater, you physically and mentally relax in the knowledge that you’re back to that place. Remember when first-person games were complex, multifarious, and had a quicksave? ”

Can I take this as confirmation that it does have quicksave/quickload functionality? One of my favourite things to do in DX1 was quicksave, try something crazy, and then load. I’d be crushed if I couldn’t do the same in HR.

One of the many dewy-eyed nostalgisms in the article, and one I can’t really abide or agree with. Quicksave a) never went away, it’s just missing from a few big releases and the list in the review is deliberately misleading and b) ruins games anyway, particularly roleplaying games, by robbing you of all responsibility for your actions or perception of threat or gravity of situation. But ultimately I guess anyone who feels the way I do about it can simply choose not to use it.

Shut up, Bilbo. It’s not “dewy-eyed nostalgia”, you patronising dullard; it’s the ability to save progress and walk off when real life intervenes, and also the aformentioned ability to try some consequence-free larking about.

I bet you never even tried tidying Manderly’s office with the GEP gun.

Bilbo: I agree with everything you said, including the last part where you say it’s basically your choice whether to actually use quicksave or not :P

I think it’s nice to have the option to quicksave, and I use it in most games which are, quite frankly, designed with the function in mind. Now, if someone made a game that was designed around the fact that you COULDN’T save – like a high-budget Roguelike – then I’d be excited.

I did a feature for my student paper that you might be interested in reading. It’s about playing STALKER without the ability to save, ever (so basically having one life):link to 4.bp.blogspot.com

I think I stole the basic idea from someone who did it in Far Cry 2, but it made for a good article (and was actually very fun to do. I’d recommend trying it if you’re a STALKER fan)

Good read, thanks. Pretty comprehensive (and by the way very nicely presented, good show). I agree that there’s more/less of a need for quicksaves dependant on design decisions, but that leads me down the path of feeling like maybe quicksave is as much a crutch for the developer as it is for the gamer – there’s less need to structure an experience fairly, organically, and logically if the player is an omnipotent god-made-man who can look as he leaps and then leap again, and quicksave/load is generally every bit that empowering.

Now, if someone made a game that was designed around the fact that you COULDN’T save – like a high-budget Roguelike – then I’d be excited.

But roguelikes are that game design (and, to be pedantic, allow arbitrary saving; they just don’t let you use saving as “undo”—the real opposite of saving is the checkpoint or the level code). Roguelikes, or at least Nethack, are designed so that the probability of death is proportional to time invested to avoid being frustrated: character generation is instant, so that first-level gnome with a wand of death isn’t hair-pullingly awful. As you start to build up that character and invest time in it, so does your arsenal of tools to help prevent your death grow. And as somewhat of a result, Nethack is prone to complaints (admittedly from a hardcore fanbase) that beyond a certain point it becomes too much of a certainty that you can win.

In addition, having to restart Nethack isn’t a slog, because it’s all randomly generated; but that puts constraints on what kind of settings and characters and plot you can have. If you want those things, your levels are going to be more static, and you’re going to end up with the problem of the limited-lives weaning-off-the-arcades 16-ish-bit-era, where death means you’ve got to grind through all the same areas again. That’s not fun, and not being fun is a huge problem for a form of entertainment.

And yeah, I’d agree that quicksave can be a lazy design decision. Some games are genuinely great for not having them. A few weeks ago I found myself staying in a friend’s spare bedroom that happened to have a Gamecube buried under loads of crap, and I booted up Timesplitters 2, an old favorite of mine. One thing I’d really forgotten is how few checkpoints there are. In the first level, which is about 30 minutes long, there’s only one (I think)! But yet the game’s so well balanced that I didn’t feel frustrated dying and trying again; the game demanded absolute mastery from me, and in my intoxicated state (long story) I gladly accepted its challenge. Quicksave would have ruined that experience, as would have lazy game design / unbalanced gameplay.

I guess the point is that saves / checkpoints are part of the game experience for any individual game, and neither should be taken as a necessity for a game to be good.

And LionsPhil: I get what you’re saying (I really love roguelikes myself) but I don’t get how any of that prevents a high-budget one from being a possibility. Minecraft’s already a step in that direction, in that it has randomly generated worlds and content. Imagine a game where each time you play, you’re thrust into a fully randomized 3D world (perhaps a level as big as a large Battlefield 2 map) with areas of varying difficulty and loot. There’s maybe three or four ‘quests’ to complete (similar to Skyrim’s proposed quest system), and completing the main quest beats the level. If you die you start a new one. At most you’d spend a few hours on each level. I’d love that game. Too bad nobody will ever make it!

Ah, right; I got an implicit “like a high-budget Roguelike but not” in there (and I guess making it a FPSRPG is somewhat “but not”). It would indeed be a neat thing, and in fact something I’ve idly contemplated before, but I think we’re going to need another Troika-alike team of overambitious and talented crazies to come along before anyone tries it with a chance of pulling it off. The challenges in making something so dynamic look good (i.e. not Oblivion’s dungeons) and generate fun levels, characters, and plots from what is ultimately some kind of template seem huge enough to likely deter many “sane” developers!

Disappointing. It’s not bad but it’s presented like a whole mission while in truth it’s around 2 rooms big and gives you only 15min of gameplay. Basicly it’s more like a main Quest mission get’s one extra objective instead of the Main story get’s one extra mission.

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.

The description provided makes me think that there was some demand from the publisher to include guaranteed combat. You’d think that anyone who wanted to play the game like Gears of War would just do so, but publishers have proven, time and time again, that they think the only way to create a profitable title is to allow only the lowest-common-denominator approach.

Maybe they were just following Deus Ex. There were unavoidable boss-fights you were forced to kill in that, after all – and come to think of it, feedback on the way you completed missions dropped off after the first level. Maybe they emulated it TOO well.

The ones in Deus Ex were slightly different, because while you were forced to have the characters die, you weren’t assumed by the game to have taken them down lethally, regardless of what you actually did, which seems to be John’s problem.

Also, while feedback for how you complete missions maybe slows as the game goes on, it doesn’t drop off after the first level. Carter comments on how you handle the castle Clinton assault, and gives you different equipment based on it, and then there’s big fallout over what you decide to do at the airport, though I suppose that’s more a big decision point rather than more nuanced rules of engagement.

While you had to kill Anna in DX1, there was at least an alternative method: a kill phrase, which rewarded explorers. It didn’t thrust you into a gun fight with her and she wasn’t a bullet sponge like the bosses in HR seem to be.

Me too man, I cannot wait for the next Thief, I just hope it’s not going to take a similar gameplay dive as Hitman appears to have taken, and that it’s going to be just as challenging and rewarding as the earlier ones.

Despite the criticism the game gets, I really like the 3rd and can only hope for the 4th they mix all the best aspects into one glorious game.

Deadly Shadows was still a good game. The Shalebridge Cradle level is still one of the best video game levels ever designed. I love the series though and am also eagerly awaiting the 4th installment. I maintain that Thief 2 is the best one.

Good enough, but couldnt they name it Thief Gaiden or something ? Its too bright and colorful and fantasy-ish, too much sillyness, horrible main plot, and…and a sunrise. A sunrise. In THE City. This is simply unacceptable. A sunrise ! *snort*

Someone should just go back to the one-button-and-wait hacking of Deus Ex 1. If it’s going to be a regular occurence, I don’t really want to be playing the same ’80s arcade game over and over and over.

Also when people claim it’s “dumbing down” we can point at laugh at them because Deus Ex 1 is about the least dumbed-down game that doesn’t keep all its characters on a tiled grid.

Anyway, glad to hear it (mostly) delivers. A bit of a shame about the intelligence aspect though. I was actually hoping from the marketing that it was going to be a more intelligent games than DX. Which sure, was very high-minded – but very in your face about it. Discussions about political systems and transhumanism with bartenders and the like. I’d thought that DXHR might have wrapped these things up more subtly, put them in more appropriate places – but it sounds like in fact they didn’t have quite the nerve or time to do something on the scale of that script

“Despite its obvious visual console shackles, this is a game that remembers what PC games were once all about, and honours them. It’s a refreshing reminder of what games can be, in the current swamp of six-hour follow-em-up shooters, and despite its faults, it stands shoulders, chest and waist above. When games get close to the glory of Looking Glass, our expectations can rise extremely high. That Deus Ex: Human Revolution meets so many of them is a remarkable feat.”

I went completely in the opposite direction with that. It’s curious to me how Mr. Walker could blithely dismiss the obvious flaws in graphical assets without calling “consolitus” and then in the same breath also be disappointed at the games failure to provide reasonable responses to different situations and the inclusion of boss battles all without assigning the same blame. It seems logical to me all the flaws he’s listed fall into the same category.

It’s one thing to merely have poor graphics, writing or scripting. However it’s another to show you can excel with all three in aces, EXCEPT IF YOU LOOK OVER THERE DON’T LOOK OVER THERE and then it becomes clear that there’s a limitation to the number of assets and the scripted directions you can go. It’s readily apparent that this limitation is the disc size and processing spec of a XBOX, not the skill and imagination of these developers.

I will play this game, and likely enjoy it. But I will also likely be just as disappointed in the lost potential based on the new ground broken with it’s predecessors and it’s corresponding failure to match or surpass. Much I was with Crysis 2, for the very same limitation.

Disappointing as the game’s supposed… inflexibility if you decide to slaughter everyone in the factory is, we must remember that if it weren’t for developers underestimating player stupidity we wouldn’t have “What a shame”.

Really, while Activision should be careful to not let CoD get stale (though they won’t be), they’ve got the huge-selling modern-scripted manshoot. The lesson that THQ, 2K and EA need to learn (and to their credit, 2K seem to have gotten this better than the rest) is that you don’t get your own billion-dollar franchise by doing everything the same as the one that already exists.

Now, I wonder what the issues with Deus Ex would have been at the time? Joke AI, ugly combat, the meaninglessses of choice as you feel your options narrowing towards end-game? That other than Paul, no one seems to care if you leave targets alive or dead? The loss of open maps and sidequests in favour of more linear shooter-style maps and missions during the last third?

I ask this as I finish up DX1 today and compare it with the preview build of DXHR as well as this review. I found the boss fight somewhat silly, but apparently plot-important to Montreal? I’m not attached to non-lethal, ( I find it, too, somewhat silly. None-lethal methods vs people trying to kill you is…very game-ish to me), so killing that boss seemed like something Jensen, under the stress of the moment, would do. Plot-wise.

(But I am glad John makes demands, because the next installment needs to be even better and John’s unfair comparisons with his *love-tainted wishful memories of DX1:John’s Imagination Edition* will help! )

[SPOILERS IF YOU HAVE NEVER PLAYED DEUS EX 1]
[HAHA LIKE THAT COULD EVER HAPPEN]
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Other latin words and such. The funny part about Paul’s “non-violence” is that it isn’t really an objection to killing, it’s just an objection to killing his allies. Once you switch sides he doesn’t care if you take a LAW to the paris police, or anything at all. It’s only Carter who really seems to care about nonviolence in an ideological sense. More latin words are on the way…fake latin words, to be exact. Lorem ipsum zoop a zoop.
[OK]
[THE SPOILER IS OVER]

Yeah, Carter is more Paul than Paul. I would say DX1’s very last setting is properly open. And in HR’s slight defence, 1 as designed had a mandatory boss kill in the form of Anna Navarre—it’s just that it a) wasn’t in a blasted cutscene and b) could be a worked around by the fans as a result of that and all the emergent fun the “broken” AI caused.

That said, ISTR they did claim to design IW with a non-lethal playthrough in mind, so if so it’s a regression there.

Very glad to hear that the game allows for multiple approaches. However, how forgiving is it for a player who dabbles in a wide variety of skills? I very rarely make a specialist character in my first playthrough of a single-character RPG, if for no other reason than any decent game will make all of its options sound fun and interesting. However, some games *cough*Oblivion*cough* are structured so that you are inordinately punished for sub-optimal builds.

Based on the leak, I’d say the problem with AUGs is that the hard earned practice points don’t yield the same value of results when invested…. for example, there are two equally interesting, fun and substantial Aumentations, however one would swallow 8 praxis points to max out, while the other just 3.

Also based on the leak – I’d say that the jack of all trades would work more than fine, maybe even I’d say it’s the best approach in the beggining and then specialize later only the most used augs.

The problem with the augs is that they’re all so boring. There are three aug upgrades just for increasing your inventory size, for example. Almost a third of all the aug upgrades are dedicated to the hacking minigame (like 16 upgrades for a minigame). Most stealth augs are about ‘improving’ your radar, which kinda sucks because I find stealth more interesting without a radar at all.

Augmentations should be the opportunity to give players amazing powers that allow them to play creatively. But the augs in HR are almost all dull and lifeless.

JohnP how can you even say that? I’m literally goggling here. Consider yourself goggled. The augs that don’t have an immediate awesome impact – jumping over streetlamps, seeing through walls, etc – have a marked difference to how you play the game. The inventory aug lets you be a total video-game character and carry 4 rocket launchers and a bike around on your back; if you don’t shell out for it, you’re going to have to restrict yourself to a small amount of the smallest weapons, and clever-sneak your way around the obstacles that your tiny arse(nal) can’t handle.

I’m relieved to hear DX:HR is a good game (not the least because it’s one of the few I’ve ever pre-ordered). That said, I’ve come to realize that smart games in general and the “whole choices & consequences” thing in particular is not and have never been as important to me personally as I once pretended it was (simply because it made me feel more intelligent and sophisticated than I actually am).

And no matter how a good stealth is implemented in a game, I still hate it with all my heart – which means, among other things, that my current strictly non-violent (second) playthrough of the original Deus Ex is driving me absolutely insane. Still can’t wait for Friday, though…

And when John wrote about smart games and changing your philosophy I thought – is there any game that is truly like what John describes ?

… Deus Ex?

I won’t have the same effect on everyone, sure, but there’s no question that DX1 is a smart game, written and designed by people who were widely-read and very thoughtful. HR doesn’t have the same feeling based on the leak, and it sounds like that’s what John found in the full game.

I’m 7 hours in, and I haven’t even started the second real mission. I spent probably 20 minutes in the tutorial, and maybe 2 hours in the first mission. The rest of the time has been spent just exploring the streets of Detroit and taking on side-quests.

I really liked the intelligent conversation in Deus Ex. When I was younger I didn’t understand them (but wanted to), now I’m older I understand them and appreciate them. Surely it’s a win win to keep that kind of dialogue around (without pitching it TOO high, only took me 10 pages of “Being and Nothingness” to use Satres works as a toilet paper alternarive)

What I like about Deus Ex’s conversations is that they talk about “lofty” ideas but they don’t usually use “lofty” language…it’s average bums and soldiers and augmented agents who aren’t much into books, having these conversations, and even the philosophers in the story generally don’t waste time on unnecessary polysyllables.

It’s one of the best tests of whether you actually know what you’re talking about — limit your philosophies to one or two syllable words, and you’ll see if you’re talking sense or nonsense. =)

“I skipped the WIT and the comments because of spoilerphobia, someone please just tell me, does John give out a 10/10?”
No, but he said it was pretty good. So, you know, 7.5 out of a Half-Life of Hats with a side of scotch.

Sounds like more of a 9.5 out of 10, with a heavy emphasis on “game gets so close to perfection that the flaws are thrown into sharp relief.” But the flaws (no spoilers) are along the lines of “graphics are maybe not great sometimes and I blame the TV toys” and “once in a long while the game forces you to do X, and X is really stupid and doesn’t fit with the game and just blow through it so you can get back to the wonderful, wonderful stuff.”

So yeah, makes me happy I preordered. Also, I am sorry Squeenix is being stupid about the EU release date. Go play Xenoblade Chronicles or something while you wait.

Sounds like he liked it, just not sure why – he makes reference to a few big, self-face-punchingly annoying problems dirtying up the scene, but then kind of washes over them in the summing up, which is odd. But the other reviewers are all doing the same thing, so it’s probably going to be worth the purchase if it sounds like your thing.

Heheh, three different opinions, three different scores – Please RPS, never implement scores – this clearly demonstrates that a solid well written piece of text is the best way to help people understand whether and how much they will enjoy a game – trying to give this a numerical rating is an outdated and quite frankly ridiculously dull idea.

Maybe if game creators carried a “Michelin Star” type rating with them?

Thanks guys, it seems DX 3 got a 8.3/10 from John. That means it’s probably good, preordering NOW!
The lovely thing about rating numbers is that you can see the verdict at one glance. Something i miss at the WITs.

So great to read this. I uh… made some opinions based on the leak and in general I felt extremely happy with the game, pre-ordered etc.

Question: John, did you play it with the Golden Outlines? It could have been switched off in the options in the leak. I played without them, but the real reason was they looked awful – like plush neon tubes. Do they look awful in the final game?

Also, I don’t think the hatred towards the first bossfight is entirely deserved. I am no friend to cutscenes, but – to be fair

*SPOILER*

he kills himself – it is not a kill forced on you, it is his decision, his suicidal attempt at your life, which you escape by jumping off his grenade rigged hug. Also, the fact that you pumped tranqs and electroshocks into his augmented body does not mean he can’t cough blood, I mean, try it on anyone and I’ll guarantee it would do substantial harm… Also, that bossfight can be dealt with in many different ways (environment hazards, stuns, lots of weapons around, and sneaking too!) So I don’t think invoking “super mario” is in place… in this case.

As the review went on it started to sound worse and worse….this review has made up my mind now not to bother…

I suggest people read the whole review and not just the glowing begining.

Front what I can read from the previous comments it seems many never ead the whole review…

The game isn’t smart…but the developers where…graphics are OK but not mind blowing…hacking mediocre…stealth superb…choices there but not followed through enough…levels become boring after awhile…
Thats what I got from the review.

I think thats perhaps a little bit glass half full. John makes it clear that these flaws only stand out because the rest of the game is so good.

Also he ends “…a game that remembers what PC games were once all about, and honours them. It’s a refreshing reminder of what games can be in the current swamp of six-hour follow-em-up shooters, and stands shoulders, chest and waist above. When games get close to the glory of Looking Glass, our expectations can rise extremely high. That Deus Ex: Human Revolution meets so many of them is a remarkable feat.”

“Yeah, don’t bother when 11 years after DX there is a first worthy successor. ”
Yeah of course.
REJOICE BROTHERS! A DECADE AFTER A BRILLIANT GAME WE NOW FINALLY GET A GAME THAT IS ABOVE AVERAGE BUT STILL FALLS SHORT OF A DECADE OLD GAME!

Truly we live in a blessed time, when it takes ten years to almost reach a highpoint but still not get there.

I know there were plenty of criticisms in there, John, but somehow all I read was: BRILLIANT! BRILLIANT! BRILLIANT! Cant wait for 4 days time and hoping Steam actually unlocks on time, no Steam-time nonsense please!

“I completed the game without firing a bullet. Let alone killing anyone. (With a massively exceptional caveat we’ll be coming to very soon.) Using a combination of tranq guns, the tasering stun gun, and most of all, hands-on non-lethal take-downs, I made sure that the available enemies were out of commission, but without any loss of life.”

My plans are rather the same.
I want to play through this like Batman.

You did not take one of the offered suggestions. I know you think that the world is a sandbox that you can alter in any way the mechanics allow, but I prefer if you limit your choice to one of the many attractive paths I have presented to you (it’s all in the numbers).

I’m sure loads of people know this already but the first time they printed concept art in a preview in PC Gamer I noticed that all the weapons are manufactured by some company called Steiner Bisley, as in Daisy and Tim.

After reading this article, I will allow myself at last to become excited.

However, I find the punchy stabby violence rather too visceral for complete enjoyment (based on the trailers and such) so I am not sure what to do about that. Maybe I’ll just go for guns instead of melee takedowns.

Anyone know if this game is designed to be easily moddable? (Just textures and sound clips and such…)

however, some of them are very good – silent choking etc. while others are silly – tap on the shoulder+punch in the face (as a silent takedown.)

but in most cases, they feel great. It’s a very nice reward for previous static minutes crouched behind a crate, biting your lips and waiting for the guards to finally desynchronize their patrol routes…

+ there are those stupid XP rewards, that force you to play with takedowns. I am RPG slave and experience addict so I really don’t have a choice – I NEED those XP.

Most XP you get for stealthy and ‘expedient’ takedowns, which also speaks volumes about John. Praxis points junkie like all of us.

Mostly my problem is that the lethal ones really make me wince. I’m kind of a sissy when it comes to seeing things that look like they’d actually hurt, and there are a few of those in the lethal and nonlethal categories both. (I miss out on a lot of supposedly-good T.V. shows and movies because of this same squeamishness too — at least in DXHR I can avoid it with rocket launchers? =)

Edit: aww, but if rocket launchers give less xp :(

WELL WE WILL JUST HAVE TO SEE IF I CAN TOUGH IT OUT!!! (either the lack of xp, or the owchie animations)

Harlander, you will almost certainly never see this again, but THANKS BUNCHES for mentioning the celery stalk thing. At first I was all like “haha that’s a good joke guy, I knew it was fake sound” but actually being able to imagine what the source of the fake sound might be has made it shockingly easier to bear.

Now when dude’s arms get snapped I just keeping tellin’ myself, “LOL CELERY?” and I am not squeamish about it much at all! You are a great man, Harlander.